PARIS!

Our first view of Big Eiffel!




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Paris at Night

Iceland, Days Two & Three

more from Iceland!

Blue Lagoon parking lot - note the mossy and lava-rocky landscape! this was all around the blue lagoon area!

Gullfoss, a waterfall created by the separating of the European and North American tectonic plates

that's how you spell "Shell" in Icelandic: Sjálfsafgreiðsluverð. Not even joking. Also, 191.6/litre for gasloine!!! (in reality, it was more like $2.30/litre, we paid around 70 canadian dollars [5500 Kroner] for 30 litres.)

more Gullfoss, followed by more Gullfoss

Glacier in the distance

Paris, mon cherie!

The flight ended up being 2 hours, and it was time difference that made local time in Paris 6:30am, not the length of the flight! So we arrived in Charles de Galle with absolutely no sleep, no food and completely lost. We managed to figure out the train and get to the Gare du Nord train station to buy an overnight ticket to Belgium. This way, we could sleep on the train and not have to settle ourselves for too long in expensive Paris!
But there were no overnight trains to Brussles, only in the morning! We were stuck! We suddenly needed a place to stay! People at the station were really helpful and got us a map of cheap hostels. Hotels were about 119euro per night!!! ahh! so hostels were a must. Our bags were heavy so I thought that I would call places first, so I had to buy this really expensive phone card. I called the first place on the list, and asked "parle vous anglais?" Up until this point, everyone I asked this said yes. But the woman on the phone said no! My french is so, so bad, and I froze! I didn't know what to say or do so I just hung up!!! But exhausted, starving and at a loss for what to do, we decided that we needed to find somewhere, so we sucked it up, put on our bags, and with the hostel map in hand, we went looking. We found a really cheap place about 2 blocks away. This women didn't speak english either, and since all that could come to mind was Spanish, we dug out the lonely planet book, went to the language section in the back, and asked for a room. She had one, a very very cheap one, at 35euro for both of us.
But.... you get what you pay for...! 5 floors up, no elevator, smelly shared toilet, no shower, key barely works, room probably wasn't cleaned (garbage can still full = bedding not changed?)... hostels sacks are a godsend! All that mattered though is that we had somewhere to sleep and leave our bags. We slept all morning, then spent the afternoon picnicking under the Eiffel tower! We found some nice salad and fruit for our only meal of the day, and ate it on a grassy area at the base of one of the four pillars of the tower. We got some amazing photos. Then we wandered around the area, near Champs d'Elysees. There was a lot of green space and a beautiful park with a pond and waterfall near the tower. It was so nice. We stayed for sunset and watched the Eiffel tower light up and sparkle before taking the train back to our hotel. We survived the night at the creepy place and went to the train station in the morning for our ride to Brussles!

Blue Lagoon

In Iceland, people told us how lucky we were to have such nice weather. We thought "yeah, it's sunny. That's nice." But then on the last day there, we found out just how lucky we had been! It was wind and rain and cold that we don't see at home until October! But, good thing we saved the best for last and spent the last afternoon in the blue lagoon! This is a hot lagoon that steams at a comfortable 38C or so, and it glows blue (literally!) because of all the silica in it! We saw it at night too and it was still glowing! When you were swimming in it, it looked like a beautiful aqua marine colour, and it was raining and cold but we were so warm in the lagoon! It is warm from geothermal-ness (earlier, on our way there, we saw mountain sides billowing out smoke and sulfur smells at geothermal hot spots), and the sand that you stepped on underneath was black ground-up lava rock sand! We were in the water for four hours before heading back to the car to do a final pack. Everything was a little wet. And we were very tired from the relaxing lagoon! But luckily we had a 5 hour flight ahead of us so we could sleep and refresh...
or so we thought...

Iceland, Day One

greetings from Gullfoss Iceland!
Iceland is much harder to navigate than we originally thought. Internet is sparse, the road signs are strange (we rented a car), and the majority of people we encounter aren't very nice. But there have been some very nice people (particularly in the Sri Chinmoy-decorated vegetarian restaurant we found, which was errily similar to Satisfaction Feast in Halifax, and it turned out the guy who works there knows the owner of Satisfaction Feast in Halifax!), and after leaving the immensely busy and unfriendly rekjavik in a hurry, we ran into some amazing scenery and some very quiet roads!

The flight in was great, flying over iceland was awe-inspiring, and the airport was extremely small, but very well designed (architechure and graphic-wise). There was initially a major mishap with our car rental (we repeatedly ran into people who had never heard of Kemwel rental cars), but things got worked out after we found out on a random online forum that Kemwel is a 3rd party booking company, and they actually book you an Avis rental.

Driving here is nuts, navigation is equally as hard, as all of the signs are, well, Icelandic, and the words all look the same, and apparently they all must have at least 5 sylables...

Our favorite part so far is indeed the scenery in the very uninhabited back country parts of Iceland.

On to photos: